Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup following a blockbuster $65 billion Series H funding round announced on Thursday.
The San Francisco-based developer of the Claude chatbot family now commands a post-money valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $852 billion market capitalisation.
The record-breaking round was co-led by major venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. It nearly triples Anthropic’s previous $380 billion valuation recorded in February. The funding package also includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including a $5 billion tranche from Amazon, alongside fresh backing from semiconductor and hardware groups such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
Enterprise adoption drives rapid growth
The sharp rise in valuation reflects Anthropic’s aggressive commercial expansion and growing adoption across enterprise markets. Alongside the funding announcement, the company said its run-rate revenue has exceeded $47 billion this month, up from $30 billion earlier in the year.
Industry analysts say much of this momentum has been driven by demand for its software development tools, particularly Claude Code.
“This is a big market where apparently Anthropic has the best product. The increase in valuation in a short period of time is unprecedented for a startup.”
Anthropic is now the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence company.
New model releases and infrastructure push
To reinforce its position, Anthropic also unveiled its latest flagship model, Claude Opus 4.8, alongside a preview of Claude Mythos, a specialised security-focused ecosystem. Internal benchmarks reportedly show Opus 4.8 delivering major improvements in financial analysis, agentic reasoning and autonomous coding, with a four-fold reduction in code vulnerabilities compared with its predecessor.
“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens,” said Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao.
The company said the fresh capital will also help address compute constraints that have forced it to impose peak-hour usage limits in recent months.
Regulatory scrutiny and IPO speculation
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-focused developer of frontier AI systems. However, its rapid rise has attracted regulatory scrutiny, including a dispute with the US administration, which recently labelled the company a “supply chain risk” after it declined to grant the military unrestricted access to its core models.
Despite these challenges, the funding round is widely seen as a stepping stone towards a potential public listing. Major Wall Street institutions are already preparing for a wave of technology IPOs, with Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX all widely reported to be considering large-scale listings as competition intensifies in the race to develop artificial general intelligence systems.
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